The Fifth Stage
by Blame-It-On-The-Alcohol
Summary: "They said it would get better. They lied. But she's just sleeping, right?" The mother can't remember what hope is since her daughter's death, and she's trapped in her shadow world, praying for a savior. For Caesar's Palace Color Prompts: Pink.


**So, I have decided to take part in the Caesar's Palace Color Challenge! 15 one-shots, 15 prompts; Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Pink, Brown, Black, White, Gray, Bronze, Silver, Gold and Rainbow. Do it all and you become Victor of the Color Challenge. It's really interesting, check it out!**

**I've planned out all the prompts and this is my second-Pink: The Fifth Stage. Hope you like it! It's nothing like my usual stories-it's angst, yes, and tragedy, for certain, but there's something else too-you'll have to read to see what I'm getting at.**

**Kara x**

* * *

><p>Today's the day that shouldn't be, an achingly cruel reminder of a past she wishes she could forget. If only it were possible. Normally anniversaries are times of celebration, but this anniversary is tainted by twisted shadows and splatters of blood that she still sees everywhere.<p>

How has it been five years? They told her it would be better after five years. They told her there were five stages to bereavement; denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. They told her she'd be living a normal life by now, that she'd be long past Stage Five.

_They fucking lied…I'm still trapped in the blackness of her dead-eyed gaze with no light through the shadows to follow. The Fifth Stage is nothing but a warped impression of a long-repressed memory._

_(It never gets easier, no matter what they all say.)_

* * *

><p>Today's the day where she remembers Kessi.<p>

Kessi Abi, the girl with the pink dress and dark blue eyes, always deep in thought. The girl with the breaking dawn laughter and calm sunset smile.

Francesca Abi, the girl with the candy-pink reaping dress and piercing terror in her dark blue eyes, ripped out of any beautiful peace in her hidden thoughts. Her daughter, with the laughing bells that will never again ring, the tranquil smile that will only grace her again in life's sudden closure.

District Three Tribute Francesca Mae Abi, the girl with the fluorescent pink backpack so contrasting to the soft tones of her party dresses that she feels she could never really wear again, even if given the chance. The steely look in her deep blue eyes as she drives the blade, wicked with its sadistic metallic glint, into her tormentor's throat and chokes out a sob as the artificial grass is dotted with pink, cruelly in her favourite shade as a child. Laughter and smiles belong to Kessi, and Kessi no longer exists in this world. Carefree Kessi is gone; haunted Francesca lives, but not for long. And Francesca fears that she'll never get Kessi back.

Betrayed District Three Tribute Francesca Mae Abi, the girl who was tucked up in a semblance of peace in her once-pink sleeping bag, dulled with mud to keep out predators. _Too bad she never recognised a hidden predator as deadly as any mutt._ The pleading stare in those deep blue eyes as her ally stands coldly over her with a mace clutched so tight his knuckles are blanched white. She manages her last tranquil smile as a spike pierces that wild young heart, and her blood makes abstract patterns on the stone floor. The ally-she's repressed his name-doesn't have time to react before Francesca's District partner impales him on a sword.

_They tell her vengeance is sweet, but she knows it's sweet like sugared nightlock._

Her sleeping daughter, Francesca Mae Abi, lies in the soft pink casket as they cover her with dank soil. The mother wants to scream, _don't do that, she was always scared of the dark, when she wakes up again…she'll be scared…let her out of that box! I'll take her home with me, give her every remedy, rock her in mommy's arms and sing sweet lullabies like when she was young…she's still young…younger…until she opens those deep blue eyes and laughs that sunlight laugh, and smiles her moonbeam smile again, and everything will be fine…_

Someone tells her that in an ancient language, 'Abi' meant to leave, to go away, to say goodbye and depart, sometimes forever.

_(She'd think it was ironic if humour wasn't long dead.)_

* * *

><p>Today's the day she walks into her living room and sees three unfamiliar children sitting in her house. She's about to scream and call the Peacekeepers before her dulled eyes capture an unsettling detail.<p>

The boy has Kessi's button nose. The elder girl has Kessi's auburn waves and the much younger girl, her eyes…the blue, has she seen it before?…no, she's imagining it. Grimacing in pain and clutching her head, the mother turns her head away from these fragments of a reality she can't face, not yet.

She hears a pounding at the door and it ricochets through her head, she freezes, this was _her _private world, hers and Kessi's, and people are invading it and _they_ _look like Kessi but she doesn't know why…_and when she answers the door it's a cold Peacekeeper with steel-rimmed glasses covering her eyes. The woman-for some reason the word 'mother' brings stabbing pains-doesn't have to look at the Peacekeeper's eyes to know they're _that exact shade _of blue.

"_Madam, Census is being taken…please report, how many children do you have?"_

Her eyes are glassy and unfocussed as she replies, "One. Francesca Mae, she's just 12 yesterday," she says proudly. Then her placid look twists to afraid. "There are three children in my house. Can you get rid of them for me? I don't know them, and they look so peaceful sleeping I don't wish to wake them..."

After following the dazed woman into what was once the woman's living room, the Peacekeeper's lip curls in distaste. "I'll get the coroner." Swift exit, slammed door, more stab wounds in her crumbling head, rocking with agony, _why so much pain? Everything, everything here, reminds me of something, someone._

Those three pretty children are still there, but their eyes are glassy, unfocussed, like someone she once knew…a freezing hand brushes against her shoulder, dangling from the boy…no steam of life through the cold steadily puffs from their lips.

But they're sleeping, right? They're just sleeping. She looks up at the bloodstained corpses and gives a faint smile, shifting, slipping away, through this distort of screams. The sleeping children are so emaciated they're like huddled skeletons, and she wonders, why does nobody feed them? She'll be sure to as soon as they wake up…wouldn't want to wake peaceful children up…lest they cry…

_(Somewhere in that shadowed mind, she absent-mindedly murmurs that the sleeping kids look a lot like that girl lying in her candy-pink bed upstairs, the one that doesn't move, hasn't for years. What was her name, again?)_

* * *

><p>Today's the day she wakes up screaming as the skeletons crumble to dust. She forgot Kessi…how could she ever forget Kessi, even in the torture world that incarcerates her during sleep? Dreams perish by nightmares' bloodsoaked mace, <em>always. <em>It's her punishment for a crime _they _tell her she committed. She can't imagine how terrible it must have been for this kind of punishment. _You deserve it._

_(It's always a mace, for some reason. Always the same mace with the sapphires embedded in that silver handle. She can't imagine why. She hates maces.)_

_(Is this even living, anyway?)_

* * *

><p>Today's the day that she staggers to the living room for <em>anything <em>to put her back in that torture world, anything that can take her away from this reality because eternal torture could never compare to this _sick ghost of life _that they made her endure.

_(Who are they, anyway? The voices that call to her in shadow's guise?)_

She hears the slightest guttural cry and spins around, gripping her knife with knuckles white as moon, and sees three sleeping children on the couch. A boy with that button nose and cheekbones like knives. An elder girl with auburn waves and prominent ribs. And the younger girl…_I'm not looking into her eyes!_

_(Wha…they said…they said nightmares END when you wake up!)_

_**(But, Sora, the voices **_**_lie_.**_** They'll tell you anything. Like all you have to do is want to escape, and the children will wake up.)**_

_(But I do want to escape…I've always wanted to escape…but never this much…let me back into the light…please…)_

_**(I think she's waking up!)**_

_**(Come on, just a bit more pushing, and she'll break through!)**_

The younger girl coughs slightly, softly, gently, and cracks open her eyes. She stares curiously at the woman rocking on the floor, the woman who's normally silent and still like a china doll. Slowly, achingly, trying not to expel any energy she's never going to replace when her only food is a few berries a day, she softly pitter-patters to the lady with those deep blue eyes so like hers, and lays a warm cocoa hand softly on her shoulder.

"…_Mommy?…Mommy wake up!…Mommy?…"_

_(A crack appears in the ice, and it multiples into millions of tiny fissures that spread all around this black lake, and the woman with the auburn waves and deep blue eyes is floating, floating to the top, and she's almost broken through…)_

"…_Mommy, it's me. Your baby…"_

_"Mommy, it's me. Mae. I'm Mae. I'm five and I have blue eyes and I have a sister and a brother and I used to have another sister but she died, mommy, she died when I was a baby, and then you went silent and still...do you remember? Do you remember, Mommy? Please wake up, Mommy..."_

_**(Her eyes have opened!)**_

_**(Oh, happy days! It's over! It's finally over!)**_

_**(I can see a glimmer of light! I'd forgotten light...warmth...it's so bright!)**_

_**(Swim for it! Come on, let's go!)**_

The woman stills, stops rocking, and Mae looks concerned. Her sister and brother, so distrusting of this foreign being that has been gone for so long, slowly, cautiously crawl off the couch, stone floor cold beneath their emaciated frames. Young as they are, they can sense that _something beyond the realms of any understanding has just happened._

Tentatively, gripping onto each other for support, they each lay a small hand on the strange woman's shoulder, and Mae pipes up in her weak, gentle voice-

"_-Mommy? Are you there?"_

_(The woman floats to the top of the dank lake, her soft pink dress waterlogged, and the beings fish her out quickly, lay her gently on the grass at the banks, and she coughs and splutters, stills, then her eyes fly open and she says-)_

"_**-Yes, Mae. Mommy's here."**_

* * *

><p><em>A long way above the realm of their existence, an all-too-familiar young girl, guised in a soft pink dress that's drying in the sun after being waterlogged for so long, watches her mother walk nervously out of the house, shoot a rabbit with shaking hands on the unfamiliar yet all too familiar bow, and bring it home. She watches Kessa and Abbi, as the light flickers uncertainly, then brilliantly, in their eyes, and they silently rejoice that she's back, and even though things in this world are made to be broken, they can just <strong>feel <strong>that life is going to get better._

_But most of all she watches Mae, the guardian angel who broke the bars to the ice prison. The little girl who finally managed to show that lost, broken woman that the Fifth Stage-**acceptance**-isn't so unattainable after all._

_Kessi Mae Abi sighs contentedly, curls up in her sun-dried, soft pink dress, and waits for the lullaby, letting Sora Abi's voices slowly fade away, knowing that when she wakes up she won't be scared any more. Because she'll have a mommy to rock her in her weathered arms and sing sweet lullabies, and she'll still be young, and there'll be no reasons to fear._

_(In the far distance, the mother thinks she hears a familiar voice start to sing.)_


End file.
